External HD for Media FAT32 or NTFS?

[EmoMakesMeCry]

ok, here's the situation. i recently bought a Maxtor 250G external hard drive to store my 97 gigs of music and 101 gigs of movies and tv shows and such because i was running dangerously low on my internal hard drives and i wanted a secure backup of them all.

my question is, should i leave it as FAT32 like it was preformatted or should i reformat it as NTFS. i know that FAT32 will make it easier to use cross-platform, but i doubt i'd be using this on anything but winXP. NTFS im guessing would make the file access a little faster but is it worth it?

[Brian]

Well, since you have movies, is there a chance that you may have long movie files over 4GB? FAT32 has a max file size of 4GB, while files on NTFS are only limited by the size of the drive. There are some other differences which should be worth noting. NTFS is more reliable and secure. I personally would reformat it in NTFS just for the hell of it. Even if the benefits are slight, formatting the drive is easy enough to make it worth it.

Here are a couple links that go more in-depth:

http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm

http://www.thundercloud.net/information-avenue/ntfs-vs-fat32/
(aimed towards WinXP installation but has good info)

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsx ... _between_NTFS_FAT_and_FAT32.asp (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/using/productdoc/en/default.asp?url=/windowsxp/home/using/productdoc/en/choosing_between_NTFS_FAT_and_FAT32.asp)
(from MS, so you know it’s gotta be right! Or horribly wrong… ;-))

[EmoMakesMeCry]

one thing i forgot to mention is that i didn't think about it until after i had transferred all the files over. so if i change it to ntfs i gotta move all the files back then back again. so i just dunno if it's worth it.

i tested the movies and music and theres no lag whatsoever when i play them.

and i dont have any movies that are over 2 gigs.

[Brian]

Oh, well if the drive is already full of stuff, just leave it as is until you find an actual need to change the file system. If it works as is and has no problems, I wouldn't really worry about it.

[EmoMakesMeCry]

i just dont want to lose this stuff, lol. i've been working on this collection for about 6 years. :)

[Brian]

Yeah, that is quite a collection I must say.